Ventilation of CFC-11 in a global ocean circulation model constrained
by WOCE data.

M. Follows, D. Stammer and C. Wunsch

International WOCE Newsletter, 35, 3-5, (1997)

ABSTRACT

One of the major reasons for observing the global ocean is to infer the
transport properties of quantities important to climate, including
heat, freshwater, carbon, oxygen, etc. Given the disparate observational
techniques which formed the World Ocean Circulation Experiment,
the only feasible approach is to combine the data with general circulation
models (GCMs) to produce the required estimates. We demonstrate here
preliminary global ocean circulation estimates based on an OGCM
constrained by a variety of global data sets. The resulting model state
is employed in an offline mode to simulate the ventilation of
chlorofluorocarbon 11 (CFC11) into the ocean.
Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate that including the
tracer data itself in the state estimation procedure can
provide additional constraints.